1
Economic History Society Annual Conference
26-28 March 2010
University of Durham
Jim Phillips, Department of Economic and Social History, University of Glasgow, Lilybank House, Bute Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RT
The Moral Economy of the Scottish Industrial Community: new perspectives on the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike
This paper makes a contribution to debates about the economic framework of industrial politics by examining aspects of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike in Britain, focusing on developments in Scotland. It focuses on the material and moral resources available to the strikers. The strike against pit closures is generally understood in terms of peak level relations between the Conservative government, the National Coal Board (NCB) and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and the shifts in energy supply that decisively weakened the miners’ bargaining position. It is also often portrayed as a top-down imposition on the workforce and the industry by the ‘politically-motivated’ union leadership, and as a public order issue, with many arrests and prosecutions arising from the picketing of mines, steel works and other economic units.[1]
The literature on the miners’ strike includes accounts that look beyond high politics to analyse coalfield industrial relations and politics, sometimes through examination of the NUM, its leadership, officials, and strategy.[2] Such analysis can be related to broader questions in industrial relations literature about union strategy, the meaning and extent of ‘militancy’, and ‘mobilization’ (or ‘mobilisation’) of union members in pursuit of a range of identified workplace, industrial and political goals.[3]
These are important approaches and questions, pointing to the value of empirical investigation. They do not readily explain, however, the varied patterns of community support for the year-long 1984-5 strike, other than suggesting that Nottinghamshire miners broadly opposed the strike because geological advantages made their pits easier to work and therefore their jobs safer, while in Yorkshire individual strike commitment was apparently shaped by personal variables, notably family background and occupational, political and union tradition.[4] This paper analyses community support for the strike, including the involved engagement of women, and varied pit-level commitment, by examining material and moral resources. It leans to some extent on social movement theory, with the emphasis on resource mobilisation,[5] demonstrates the social and economic embeddedness of industrial politics generally, and deepens understanding of the strike as a complex and multi-textured historical phenomenon. Two key research questions are asked. First, how far can the different levels of strike commitment at different pits be explained in terms of the comparative availability of material resources available to the strikers at different pits? Second, how far did trade unionists and their supporters in mining communities articulate a distinctively moral economic discourse in support of the strike? E. P. Thompson’s famous moral economy of the eighteenth century English crowd is adopted and adapted here,[6] with the strike presented as a re-emergence of a feature of earlier coalfield protests. This was the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tradition of popular, direct action in the coalfields, involving women and children, and the ritualised humiliation of strike-breakers and colliery officials and managers. These accompanied and occasionally superseded ‘bureaucratic’, union-based procedures, especially in national disputes, notably in 1887, 1894, 1912 and 1921.[7]
This tradition had been revived in the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the first national disputes in the coal industry since the 1920s, and was even more sharply illustrated by the struggle to defend pits and local jobs in 1984-5, mediated by moral economic ideas about social resources and communal interests. Coal industry jobs, for instance, were ‘owned’ by the community as much as the individual employee or employer, to be retained within the community from one generation to the next, and this explains the complex and sometimes antagonistic response by many miners to those – especially younger men – who accepted redundancies or transfers to other pits from those that were closing or being threatened with closure. Picketing, at pits where workers broke the strike, may be understood in terms of a ‘moral economy’ discourse, with crowd discipline and goals highly evident. The ‘rough music’ of earlier crowd protests can likewise be ‘heard’ in the responses by strikers and their supporters, including perhaps especially female family members, to news of pit closures before the strike, with NCB officials verbally abused and physically confronted, and to those who returned to work during the strike. The day-to-day organisation and maintenance of the strike – including the physical sustenance of its supporters – similarly involved a ‘moral economy’ emphasis on equitable resource distribution and the mobilisation of the many material resources embedded in industrial communities. These included the endeavours of coalfield women, in paid employment as well as in strike organisation, and the support of Labour-controlled local authorities which allowed strikers to defer council housing rents. Neither of these resources was available to miners in the great disputes of the 1920s, and provided some of the essential tools of strike endurance in 1984-5. Contrasting levels of endurance across the Scottish coalfields, however, can only partly be explained in terms of localised differentials in access to each of these resources. Moral resources – commitment burnished by ideological reserves compiled in pre-strike and indeed earlier historical experience – were important if less tangible variables.
The paper builds on the author’s published work on industrial politics in Scotland and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, and the origins of the 1984-5 miners’ strike in Scotland.[8] It utilises a variety of perspectives from economic and social historical literature, and is based on NCB and NUM records and materials, Scottish Office records, the 1981 Population Census, reports in the daily press, and participant interviews conducted by the author.
Material Resources and Strike Commitment
The Scottish coalfield contracted steadily in the decades following nationalisation of coal in 1947, with the particularly biting closures of the 1960s accompanied by an important shift from relatively smaller village pits to relatively larger ‘cosmopolitan’ pits. By March 1984 most if not all of Scotland’s miners travelled to work by road – sometimes by car but in most instances bussed by the NCB – from mining communities that no longer had mines, to eleven cosmopolitan pits in East and West Fife, Clackmannan, Midlothian, West Lothian and Ayrshire. There was one surviving village pit: Polmaise, at Fallin in Stirlingshire. The ‘cosmopolitan’ pits were so called because they drew their workforces from a variety of sometimes quite widely-dispersed localities, with distinct political and working cultures.[9] In East Fife the Seafield and Frances workforces were drawn from a geographically extended ‘community’, while those who worked the thick seams of the Longannet ‘complex’ pits – servicing the va;st South of Scotland Electricity Board (SSEB) power station established at the end of the 1960s – of Solsgirth, Castlehill and Bogside at the junction of West Fife and Clackmannan were drawn from an even wider spatial territory. The miners of West Fife and Clackmannan were joined in the complex by men from North and South Lanarkshire, transferred when Bedlay shut in 1981 and Cardowan in 1983, and West Lothian, including those exiled from Kinneil when it closed at the end of 1982.
This geographical dispersal loosened the connection between community and pit in the Scottish coalfields. Yet a common theme of oral testimony provided by strike participants to the author, and present too in the substantial ephemeral literature generated in the coalfields in the mid-1980s, was the restoration of community-centred activity and identity during the strike.[10] This was important, for it was in the communities, fragmented and dispersed as they were, that the vital material resources were located for constructing strike commitment. Two are identified here: the provision of income to households with male members on strike through the wages of Married Women in Employment (MWE); and the suspension of costs to households with male members on strike where households were local authority tenants and the Labour-led local authorities deferred housing rents for the duration of the strike, examined here as Council Housing Density (CHD),. These two resources, calculated on the basis of data from the 1981 Population Census, are illustrated in Table 1. The CHD values in coalfield settlements were significantly higher than the overall Scottish value. The housing legacy of the pre-nationalised industry was mixed, with much pre-1947 private sector rented accommodation not fit for habitation by the 1950s and 1960s. Local authorities were obliged after the Second World War to make good this failing. The disappearance of the Central Fife village of Glencraig – dominated by the typical single-storey, terraced ‘miners’ rows’ housing, along the central artery – and the transfer of its inhabitants in the 1950s to the local authority housing of Ballingry, a few hundred metres to the north, is a good example. In 1981 CHD in Ballingry was 94 per cent.[11] The MWE values are perhaps more noteworthy, with most coalfield settlements characterised by higher rates of economic activity among married women than in Scotland as a whole. The ephemeral literature generated by the strike emphasises the volume and range of paid work available to women, especially in the Lothians and Fife, including assembly work in manufacturing in addition to public and private service sector employment.[12] This is spoken of too by strike participants recalling their own experiences: spouses working full-time continued to do so; spouses with one part-time job took a second and sometimes even a third part-time job to expand the household’s resources.[13] The exception, it will be seen, was Ayrshire, where the narrower span of material sustenance was perhaps reflected in the crumbling of commitment in the final quarter of the strike.
Table 1. Married Women in Employment (part-time and full-time) and Council Housing Density by Colliery in Scotland, 1981
Colliery / MWE (per cent) / CHD (per cent)Bilston Glen / 53.7 / 63
Monktonhall / 50.5 / 72.1
Polkemmet / 48.7 / 84.3
Seafield / 45.1 / 82.3
Frances / 45.1 / 82.3
Killoch / 39.4 / 82.2
Barony / 39.4 / 82.2
Solsgirth / 45.1 / 67
Castlehill / 45.1 / 67
Bogside / 45.1 / 67
Comrie / 44.6 / 55.3
Polmaise / 46.3 / 80.2
Scottish Coalfields / 46.8 / 74.0
Scotland / 45.2 / 54.6
Source: Census 1981 Scotland, HMSO, 1982, 1983.[14]
MWE and CHD are factors in the composition here of a Relative Potential Strike Endurance Index (PSE) by colliery for the Scottish coalfields, along with a third factor, the Militancy Index (MI), designed to capture the relative character of pit-level industrial relations going into the strike. This latter factor is important, for recent research published by this author demonstrates that managerial incursions on trade union rights and working practices, together with employee anxieties about the future of their pits, had precipitated serious colliery-level industrial disputes in the second half of 1983 and the first two months of 1984 at more than half of the Scottish mines, most notably Seafield and Monktonhall in Midlothian.[15]
Table 2. Pit-level Potential Strike Endurance Rankings in the Scottish Coalfields, 1984
Seafield / 4 / 2 / 3 / 1
Polmaise / 4 / 6 / 1 / 2
Monktonhall / 2 / 7 / 2 / 2
Polkemmet / 3 / 1 / 7 / 2
Frances / 4 / 2 / 5 / 2
Bogside / 4 / 8 / 4 / 6
Castlehill / 4 / 8 / 5 / 7
Killoch / 11 / 2 / 7 / 8
Barony / 11 / 2 / 10 / 9
Comrie / 4 / 12 / 7 / 9
Solsgirth / 4 / 8 / 11 / 11
Bilston Glen / 1 / 11 / 12 / 11
Sources: see Figure 1
The PSE pit-level rankings are set out in Table 2. To recap, they were calculated by adding the three relative ranked variables set out in Figure 1: MWE, CHD and MI.
Figure 1: Variables deployed to rank Pit-level Potential Strike Endurance
Married Women in Employment (MWE) by District Councils in which collieries were situated or sufficiently adjacent to collieries for there to be a reasonable expectation that miners at particular collieries were resident in these local authorities. The MWE rate was calculated by adding full-time and part-time married women in employment.
Council Housing Density (CHD) by District Councils in which collieries were situated or sufficiently adjacent to collieries for there to be a reasonable expectation that miners at particular collieries were resident in these local authorities.
Militancy Index (MI): the sum at each pit of level of support for strike action against job losses and the National Coal Board’s pay offer in the national ballot held by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in October 1982 (data in Scottish Miner, December 1982) and the involvement in an evidently significant pit-level dispute, 1983-4, ‘significant’ here meaning of sufficient gravity to be recorded in NCB colliery-level minutes or reported in the national Scottish press.
Polmaise, for instance, is ranked 1 for MI. It experienced a four week lock-out in the summer of 1983, and when its closure was announced in December 1983 the workforce was agitating for a national strike; 99.3 per cent of the pit’s NUM members voted for a strike in October 1982. In CHD terms Polmaise was ranked 6, and in MWE terms ranked 4. So the sum of its rankings was 11, the second equal lowest of the twelve pits, alongside Monktonhall, ranked 2 in MI terms, 7 in CHD terms, and 2 in MWE terms. Seafield is ranked 1 in overall PSE terms, a combined ranking total of 9 resulting from an MI rank of 3, a CHD rank of 2 and an MWE rank of 4. The lowest overall PSE rank is shared by Bilston Glen and Solsgirth, both essentially owing to low MI and CHD rankings.